Carrie Kipling ran her fingers over the page where she had pasted in her husband’s obituary. This was one scrapbook that Rud would never take down from the shelf. She looked up at the row of tall green volumes that housed his newspaper archive, then round at the packed bookcases, the bare plain of the desk. His briefcase appeared absurdly small, like a child’s toy, propped against the vacant chair.
Two years on, she was almost used to missing him. But today, as January 18th came round again, she’d had Rud in her thoughts ever since waking. It was the anniversary of their wedding, as well as the day of his death.
They’d lived together forty-four years.
Reading the column from The Times once more, she felt a gathering indignation.
‘A great mind? A great man?’
‘Impossible to tell under the blow of a great loss.’
She let out a scornful laugh.
How could they know anything, these men who only took account of scenes played out on the public stage? The world’s honours, even the Nobel Prize, had meant little to Rud. ‘What does it matter, what does it all matter?’, he used to say.
She shifted in her chair, under the weight of his sadness.
For Rud, children were always the thing. And childhood. If they wanted to ask about minds, surely, childhood was the time when minds were formed? Or deformed. That certainly was the case for Trix. At the thought of her difficult sister-in-law, Carrie sniffed.
She turned back to Rud’s obituary.
They were not asking the right questions.
‘“Loss” is the word that really applies,’ her voice was harsh in the empty room. ‘Why don’t they ask what Rud himself had lost?’
It was only after they lost Josephine that Rud changed.
Remembering, Carrie’s breath came short, she flinched, hearing the echo of that high child’s voice, gasping through fever.
‘Give my love to Daddy and all.’
And what had it done to Rud to receive that message, to learn those words were all that was left of Jo?
She could do no more than guess. Too frightened of giving way completely, of a weeping that would never end, they’d clung together wordlessly. Later, when John was killed out in France – her eyes closed for a long moment – they’d been able to talk about him. But through all the years after Jo died, she was never mentioned between them.
Such a terrible mistake. Rud must have longed, as she did, to hear Jo’s name spoken.
Forty years on, Carrie could look back on those dreadful months of 1899 with a measure of calm. She also thought she could understand more about Rud himself. His whole character seemed to alter that year.
The war in South Africa had come at just the wrong time. She was certain Rud would never have taken up with Mr. Rhodes otherwise, never have been so angry and so blind.
She found herself speaking aloud, her right hand with its swollen knuckles beating the table.
‘If you want to make out what kind of man Rud was, why he acted as he did, try looking at all that he lost.’
Set it out, year by year, as in these scrapbooks, she thought fiercely. See the pattern.
Begin with his childhood, when he left behind in Bombay a whole world that loved him…
The light was going. She switched on the lamp.
* * *
Ruddy was crooning to himself as he laid out the stones. Two by two he set them down, smooth and dark on the dulled figures of the Turkey carpet in the Bewdley dining room. He liked the freckles on the stones. The game changed. There was a stone with an empty face. Still on his knees, he moved over to the door which he had pushed shut earlier and set that stone down there on its own. His singing grew more urgent. He was standing over the stone now with his hands stretched out, so intent that when the door opened sharply the brass knob landed a punch against his temple, knocking him off balance.
His grandmother let out a scream that was cut off as the domino cracked beneath her black kid boot.
‘You naughty, naughty boy. Who said you could come in here? These dominoes aren’t toys to throw about on the floor. Come here.’
The strange white woman in the cold apron who was looking after him instead of Ayah came hurrying down the stairs. Grandmother’s house had stairs, it was made of boxes stacked up on each other, boxes that were dark inside and smelled cold. In spite of the stiff new jacket that tied up his arms, Ruddy was not safe from the thin airs that blew around every corner.
‘It’s bedtime anyway, Master Rud,’ the apron woman told him. But he was sobbing so hard he didn’t hear. Even when his mother finally came to find him, scrubbed and dressed in his nightclothes, tears were still running down his cheeks.
‘I can’t do anything with him, Mum,’ the nurse confessed.
Alice Kipling offered her an appeasing smile before taking a seat on the chair by the gloomy high mahogany bed.
‘Now Ruddy, there, there, whatever’s the matter?’
In his head he saw the baby. Mama liked the baby. She went away and left him in this cold house. She held the baby in her arms.
Her little boy, in his flannel nightshirt: Alice yearned towards the solid little body in its warm wrapping. She would have taken him on her knee but he arched away.
Biting her lip, his mother stroked his hair. She hadn’t thought of this, when the plans were made for her coming home to England for her second confinement. After what she went through with Ruddy, she couldn’t contemplate another long labour without reliable medical attention. It’d seemed such a good idea to leave Ruddy with her mother here in Bewdley.
How much she had still to learn about him, though he was only two. His temper was frightful. He’d been spending too much time with those Indian servants. She’d change all that once they were back in Bombay. It was absurd to say it but, now, face-to-face with him, he seemed almost a stranger.
‘Would you like me to sing to you, darling, while you go to sleep?’ Alice was known for her pretty voice. He nodded at once, apparently relieved, sliding down under the bedclothes and dragging the pillow just so around his shoulders. Did he do this every night, she wondered, as she bent to kiss his forehead? Leaning back with a slight effort – how tired she still was – Alice began softly with one of her favourite pieces:
‘Twas the last rose of summer, left blooming alone,
All her lovely companions –’
A howl of rage and dismay interrupted her.
‘Not Angrezi, not Angrezi,’ the child cried, followed by a burst of sound which she could not follow, though her ear did pick up the rhythms of Hindustani on her son’s voice. The child turned his face away from her to the wall.
Hesitantly, she whispered, ‘Ruddy, please turn round,’ and though the head remained averted, a small hand appeared from under the blankets and reached back towards her.
* * *
Tiny striped squirrels darted across the paths in the gardens of the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art. From her post close by the back gate of the compound, Ayah was admiring the ships, more than she could count, as they stood out at anchor in the flashing sea.
Now and then she cast an eye over at the perambulator, standing in the shade of the great neem tree. All springs and tall wheels, shining red and green, it was almost a carriage, as Ayah boasted to her sister-in-law who saw nothing of life outside the house. Closed off there behind a muslin screen, her Baba, the baby girl the Sahib said was to be called ‘Trick-see’, lay sleeping.
‘She’s such a tricksy little baby,’ he told them.
Ayah snuffed up the scent of frying spices, methi, zeera, wafting over from the servants’ quarters across the way. It mingled with the smell of earth. The garden was damp from the early watering.
The house itself was still, for Ruddy Baba, so proud that he was four years old now, had been allowed to set off with the Sahib that morning. Each day after breakfast, Kipling Sahib left to walk across to the new government college, where they did not sit to read and write at desks but worked in clay like poor village potters. What could be the gain? There the Sahib would remain all day, making drawings and other playthings, like a child.
But soon, soon Ruddy Baba would be back, holding the hand of his friend, Vaz, the tall gardener. He would come pounding clatter-clatter up the steps towards her on those small pink legs, sailor collar all anyhow, full of his adventures, all ‘Listen, Ayah, listen!’.
For the moment though, she was free. Fanning herself with the end of her sari, drinking in the breeze coming off the sea, she smiled at Prem, the young bearer, as he came round the corner of the house.
‘I knew it would not be long before you found me. It is the tailoring you are wanting, no?’ Prem looked abashed but she laughed at him, patting the floor beside her, ‘Sit, sit. Madam Sahib has gone out for the morning.’ She handed back the kurta she had offered to mend the day before.
Prem squatted beside her. After a few words of thanks, he fell silent. Usually he was eager to share the news he’d picked up around the butchers’ stalls. To report what the vegetable-sellers in Crawford Market had the impudence to charge today for chillies.
‘Is true what they are telling me in kitchen? Cook is telling me all British children are leaving us, going over the Black Water, when they are small, small?’
Ayah felt herself grow still but she nodded, silently.
‘Why are they doing this, Ayah? Why?’ In his haste, he forgot to insist on her home name, which he alone in the household knew. ‘They are tearing them away from those who take care of them while they are still nestlings, no wings of their own to fly, just helpless, so…’ He cupped his hands, as if cradling a warm ball of new life. Ayah nodded for a second time but her throat was tight and she could not speak.
After a few moments she ventured, ‘It is the fevers, they say. They fear the fevers. There are too many Babas in their burying-ground.’
Prem turned aside from her to spit in disgust over the wooden rail of the verandah, making a dark star on the red dust of the path.
‘A child can die because they are alone, without need of any fever. Do they not know this?’
‘That I have never heard talk of.’ Ayah braced herself against the doorpost. Looking straight before her she went on: ‘It will be so, with Ruddy Baba and with Baby. Also with that other Baba, which is to come.’ All the servants knew that Alice was pregnant again, though she had barely admitted it to herself.
‘It is that of which we speak, no?’
‘Do they not know? Have they no old ones to teach them?’ Meeta could not give up so easily.
‘No. They do not know. And they will not care for anyone who tells them to do other than their kind. They will do as the other British.’ She held the end of her sari before her face, while Prem stared out over the flower beds towards the bright colours of the perambulator where it lay beneath its muslin shroud.
* * *
Alice Kipling’s hands were cold in her husband’s, as he sat beside her bed in the stifling room. Although a whitewashed punkah was creaking regularly as it rose and fell, the air lay heavy, stagnant.
‘I shouldn’t have let Ayah touch him. I know I shouldn’t. But I was desperate. I hadn’t been able to sleep, I was so afraid. I knew that the doctor thought Baby John wasn’t strong. I could see it in his face.’ As she spoke she drew her hand away to pull again at a lawn wrap thrown about her shoulders.
Lockwood Kipling waited then once more began stroking the cold hands. He made another attempt to break through her refrain.
‘Darling girl, he repeated, ‘do believe me, no-one is blaming you.’
‘Ayah brought him in to me. It can’t have been more than an hour or so later. When I looked I thought he was just asleep. If I’d realised he wasn’t breathing I might have been in time. I might…’
‘Alice, Alice, there was nothing you could have done.’ Lockwood’s eyes were rimmed with red but he kept his voice steady. ‘The doctor warned me from the start that little John might not live.’ That was a fact. Doctor Mackintosh had shaken his head over the child, though there was every chance for the mother, if she could be kept calm and quiet. ‘There’s no question of any fault on your part,’ Lockwood went on.
‘I was his mother,’ the stricken voice continued without pause. ‘I should have known – ’
‘Ayah says –’
‘Ayah! What are we doing trying to bring up children in this dreadful country, with only black servants and their filthy ways?’
He flinched at her language. Then his heart turned over. What if she were to refuse to remain here with him in India? Fending off that thought, he paused to gather himself.
‘Come, come, dearest. Ruddy’s already getting on for five. He and Trix will be out of Ayah’s way and safe back at Home with your mother in Bewdley before they are –’
Oh no. Beating the air with both hands, Alice was sobbing.
‘Never. You have no idea. She said terrible things, things about Ruddy. How bad he was. And me. That I wasn’t a proper mother.’
Lockwood was silenced. He’d heard nothing of this at the time. She must have been too angry and ashamed to speak of it, even to him. He edged his chair closer.
‘I would never let them go to her, after that.’ She turned to him, piteous now.
This was no moment to reason with her.
‘Dearest one, of course not. I won’t have you made unhappy.’
The words were firm enough but his mind was racing. If not her mother, what choices were left to them? There was no question, the matter had to be resolved. It was no good thinking that Ruddy and Trix could go to her sister, Georgie. He was not at all sure that her marriage was going to last: the household at The Grange could well break up. Ned Burne-Jones, always susceptible, had made an absolute fool of himself over Maria Zambaco, the Greek beauty. Tried to run off with her last year and funked it in the end. A shambles.
Georgie’d been heroic in her efforts to keep the family together – but standing by as her husband’s mistress visited him in his studio ‘to be painted’ must have been torture. In her own home, too. ‘Just passing by that door, so firmly closed, caused my heart to shrivel,’ she’d written. The affair was supposed to be over but Ned was still seen around town in her company. No, Ned and Georgie were out of the question. There was one other married sister with a child. Stan would have been company for Ruddy. But the health of his mother, Louie Baldwin, wasn’t up to it.
Then, even as he bit his lip, his mind cleared. He and Alice weren’t the only parents sending their small children back to England and needing to find them a home. There must be people who took children in for a living. He remembered advertisements he’d skipped over, as he scanned the paper for news of travellers who might have carried embroideries or carvings from beyond the Khyber to sell. Time for a closer look.
‘You mustn’t worry about this anymore, Alice,’ he said. She was lying back now, flushed and breathless.
‘I think there may be an alternative but you need to rest.’ He reached for the sleeping draught the doctor had left. Alice sipped at it slowly, as though she could barely muster the energy to swallow.
‘That’s the way, my lovely girl.’ Lockwood held the glass to her lips till only a chalky residue remained.
Alice gave a tiny smile in reply. Sitting on by the bed, he waited till her eyes reluctantly closed.
Then he went off to find the most up-to-date copy of The Times and that week’s Pioneer. Between them he’d surely find a lead.